Rosebush Pruning
First screened and reviewed in July 2026
Director: Karim Aïnouz. Cast: Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Riley Keough, Elle Fanning, Lukas Gage, Tracy Letts, Pamela Anderson, Elena Anaya, Lolo Herrero, Yorgos Stefanakos. Screenplay: Efthymis Filippou (allegedly based on the 1965 film Fists in the Pocket, written and directed by Marco Bellocchio).
In Brief:
The race to the bottom for the Year's Worst Film is on! Tacky, lewd, and insincere in the extreme. Hostage cast.
VOR:
①
Not just skippable, but sort of imperative to miss? Aïnouz's dereliction of duty is astonishing. Even as a critique of the 1%, it's jejune.
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© 2026 MUBI |
Absolutely unsalvageable on any level. Bell is the only actor who isn't actively, distractingly egregious. Elle Fanning is wildly miscast. Callum Turner seems increasingly uncastable; his face is inscrutable and leads nowhere. Riley Keough, forever willing to Go There for directors, misplaces her trust in more or less the same way she did in the comparably gross and unneeded Butterfly Jam. Pamela Anderson can't quite find her character, tiny and dubious as it is, and she needs a director who will steer her away from her most Wuornos-y expressions.
All of that said, principal blame for the lost-at-sea vibes and the lurid affectations drenching most of the performances goes to director Karim Aïnouz, who forsakes almost every important part of his job. He flatly refuses to question his gut-level instincts, unreliable as they are. You could only make a movie this erratic, unmotivated, and flamboyantly tasteless if you were working straight from your id, and Aïnouz's turns out to be as dull and literal as it is seamy and loopy.
The actors aren't the only collaborators let down by Aïnouz's judgment. I think this is the first film that makes the excellent Hélène Louvart seem like a bad cinematographer; perhaps she was as shocked as anyone to discover how her lensing had been color-graded. It's also the first that makes me really question the capacities of Efthymis Filippou, grossly attempting a kind of splatter-paint redo of his Dogtooth script. The editing could barely be more arbitrary.
Neither the storytelling [sic] nor the image-making [sic] have any point of view beyond "the rich are diabolical, toward each other and toward all of us," and I already see from Letterboxd that this suffices for plenty of viewers. But Rosebush Pruning is the kind of art film [sic] that merits the exact same response as bottom-of-the-barrel horror flicks, fratty farces, bloated Oscar-hunt misfires, or superhero duds. Devoid of craft despite the highfalutin mirage of craftiness, cynical in the extreme (as was the decision to enfold it in the Berlin competition), but too lazy to even mold that cynicism into a shape or a frequency. Grade: D
(I originally wrote this piece on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)